Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In video surveillance applications such as those in subway stations, stores, and airports, areas of importance may need coverage by a network of camera sensors. In some applications higher resolution images (zooms) may be needed for specific areas. For example, if a subject is being tacked in a subway station, higher resolutions on the face may be needed as opposed to images of the subject's body so the subject can be adequately identified. Higher resolutions may be obtained by setting specific cameras on higher resolutions. Use of high resolution cameras for all applications may not only result in prohibitively high cost, but also increase load on system resources such as bandwidth, storage capacity, and comparable resources.
In systems where a select number of cameras are high resolution, a surveillance operator may be able select suitable cameras and resolutions for an area such that the number of cameras and the error between the assigned and desired resolutions are minimized simultaneously. However, if the number of cameras or the area to be covered is large, the task may become too complicated to be resolved manually.